Abstract:

Nowadays, we are benefiting from suitable infrastructures to develop educational-related-ideas. A significant amount of people on the planet have access to the internet by the comfortableness of few clicks from their thumbs. The speed of internet is improving every year; the devices are being more sophisticated, and also the users are being more familiar with behavior and attitude of using web applications. Internet vocabulary is a part of people vocabulary now, we see them everywhere, in shops, movies, transportations, and schools. It is not mind-boggling anymore to see a 4-year-old unlock and use a tablet device just like an adult, and in some cases even better than many of us.

Developing an eLearning portal requires a significant amount of effort and research. To be able to create a platform to deliver material to the students and not depending on the old-fashion way of education which was classrooms. We are benefiting significantly from such rotation, making it much affordable and accessible for everyone to participate in learning sessions and delivering material. But this is not the whole picture. We are missing some of the true benefits of those old-fashion classrooms, where students could participate alongside each other, feeling part of a group, and together walk in the journey of educating themselves with the nice and practical material, and feeling stronger when obstacles of learning were happening in such process.

In this paper, I would like to discuss and analyze the features that we can develop to add to once-very-futuristic-platform, an eLearning portal, and shift and progress such ordinary educational platform for nowadays education standards to an online learning community. A community to bring students together, and break the chains of the one-way communication channel, into a two-way and multiple-way communication channel. A community to integrate already-created social media tools into the platform and use it as its strength by defining a beneficial strategy. And benefiting from Artificial Intelligence to make smart assistances as a full-time companion for students to help them with their studies, enrollments, assessments, etc.

The author of this paper was teaching IT courses for two years in Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences in Finland until he released an eLearning portal to make it much easier for almost 500 of his student to follow and complete their studies. And after six months of releasing the portal and receiving feedback from more than 400 active users as the students of the portal, the need and opportunity for progressing to an online learning community was astonishing to observe and redirect the development to such direction.

Keywords:

e-learning, learning community, Artificial Intelligence, Social media integration, Web Development Technologies Improvements.